Chronicles: Volume One

Bob Dylan

Oct 2004 · Sold by Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

The celebrated first memoir from arguably the most influential singer-songwriter in the country, Bob Dylan.

“I’d come from a long ways off and had started a long ways down. But now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else.”

So writes Bob Dylan in Chronicles: Volume One, his remarkable book exploring critical junctures in his life and career. Through Dylan’s eyes and open mind, we see Greenwich Village, circa 1961, when he first arrives in Manhattan. Dylan’s New York is a magical city of possibilities—smoky, nightlong parties; literary awakenings; transient loves and unbreakable friendships. Elegiac observations are punctuated by jabs of memories, penetrating and tough. With the book’s side trips to New Orleans, Woodstock, Minnesota, and points west, Chronicles: Volume One is an intimate and intensely personal recollection of extraordinary times.

By turns revealing, poetical, passionate, and witty, Chronicles: Volume One is a mesmerizing window on Bob Dylan’s thoughts and influences. Dylan’s voice is distinctively American: generous of spirit, engaged, fanciful, and rhythmic. Utilizing his unparalleled gifts of storytelling and the exquisite expressiveness that are the hallmarks of his music, Bob Dylan turns Chronicles: Volume One into a poignant reflection on life, and the people and places that helped shape the man and the art.

Ratings and reviews

I would read the third section first, and then the first and second, if you can slog through them. There is just so much name dropping in the first section that even if you know most of these names in the folk scene of early 1960's mostly NYC it's just that: name dropping.

Bob Dylan tells his story like verses from "Tangled Up in Blue": scattered, picturesque, and not necessarily chronological. But the structure is unimportant. Chronicles Vol. 1 is proof of Bob Dylan's rightful place in music history as one of the greatest song-writers of all time. What is most remarkable should actually be no surprise: Bob Dylan's prose is immaculate. The book is simply a pleasure and delight to read.

Dylan has been a hero to me through most of my life, and I find myself still growing and understanding more of the man as time passes. What he puts out there is real and profound and somehow not all of the picture. This book is Dylan, with his humour and honesty and perception; an incredibly easy read thats really only disappointment was that it ended at all. The book reads like a Dylan song- and that is never a bad thing.

About the author

Bob Dylan has released thirty-nine studio albums, which collectively have sold over 125 million copies around the world. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature and has been awarded the French Legion of Honor, a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor. His memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, spent a year on the New York Times bestseller list.